Only in the alternate reality that prevails at the United Nations can its greatest contributor be considered a “deadbeat.” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tarred the United States with that pejorative during a meeting with Congressional leaders on March 11.

At a press conference held
on March 12 and attended by FrontPage Magazine, Ban Ki-moon tried to explain away his comments by saying it had all been
a “misunderstanding.” He indicated that he was just trying
to emphasize the fact that the United States
is about $1 billion behind on its payments, “soon to be $1.6 billion.”

“Speaking with a group of
members of the House of Representatives, I noted how generous the United
States has been in supporting the UN, both in terms of assessed and
voluntary contributions,” Ban said in trying to wiggle out of the
hole that he had dug for himself. “At the same time, I noted
that the United States is also the largest debtor…With such a large
sum of amount in arrears, it is very difficult for the United Nations
to conduct smoothly all these peacekeeping operations and other activities
of the United Nations.”

This seems like cold gratitude for the immense contribution the United States has made to the ineffective world body. The U.S. has been the largest
financial contributor to the UN every year since its creation
in 1945. The United States funds 22 percent of the UN’s regular budget,
as well as about 25 percent of the peacekeeping budget. We provide
billions more in contributions, both cash and in-kind (such as food donations for the
World Food Program), to the UN system.

Data compiled by the State
Department for the 2006-2007 UN budget cycle gives a picture of the
massive amount of U.S. spending on the UN. The U.S. contributed more
than $5.3 billion in total to the United Nations system to support all
UN agencies and peacekeeping operations during that cycle. This
included $459 million annually toward the UN’s regular 2006-2007 budget
of $4.17 billion, and nearly $870 million more to the UN’s peacekeeping
budget.

Unlike his predecessor, Kofi
Annan, this secretary general does not normally go out of his way to insult the
United States or to coddle dictators. In fact, in the same press conference, Ban Ki-moon strongly
supported President Obama’s decision to send 17,000 more troops to
Afghanistan and delivered a backhand verbal slap at Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the
anti-American, anti-Semitic president of the UN General
Assembly. In response to a question
about Brockmann’s divisive statements, Ban admonished that “the
responsible position holders like the president of the General Assembly
or the Secretary-General of the United Nations should speak for the
common interests.”

However, Ban Ki-moon went way
overboard with his deadbeat comment.

By contrast, the 54 countries
with the lowest assessment of 0.001 percent of the regular budget each
paid less than $21,000. Yet they are counted the same as the
United States in setting the UN’s budget and in all other matters
within the purview of the one state, one-vote General Assembly.

The member states of the Organization
of Islamic Conference, including all of the oil rich countries in the
Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere in the Muslim world, were assessed a
combined 3 percent of the regular 2006-2007 UN budget and 1.2 percent
of the peacekeeping budget. Yet they represented more than 29
percent of the General Assembly’s votes and held more than one-third
of the seats on the Human Rights Council.

As the Heritage
Foundation put it more than 20 years ago, “The nonaligned nations,
many of whom pay only 0.01 percent of the UN budget, use their voting
strength to approve ever expanding UN budgets and ever more programs,
committees, and conferences, which generally accomplish very little.” As a consequence, the
UN’s budget is out of control. Its regular budget has increased
by an average of 17 percent annually over the past five years and has
increased by 193 percent since the 1998/1999 biennial budget.
The U.S. government’s own budget, by contrast, grew by an average
of only seven percent annually over that period.

All this indicates the United Nations’
budget process needs supervision. There must be some form
of weighted voting on budgetary matters that would enable the United
States, Japan, and other major contributors to the UN budget to eliminate
the layers upon layers of redundant or worthless UN committees, reports,
conferences and investigations, including the discredited Durban II
review conference against racism.

The United Nations is not “underfunded
and overtasked,” as Senator John Kerry claimed during his joint
appearance with Ban Ki-moon after the Secretary General’s “deadbeat”
malapropism. It is an overfunded, oversized, and under-achieving
mass of deadwood.

We have already contributed
way too much toward subsidizing this deadwood. The U.S. should
not consider paying even a dime of its budget arrears until there is
a transparent top-to-bottom audit of all of the UN’s operations to
ferret out the massive waste and corruption, and the UN implements every
one of the audit’s findings. Let the UN’s swarm of parasites make
up the difference.

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